Guest blogging is one of the things people are supposed to do. The logic is that by creating guest blog posts for other people, you gain credibility and also traffic to your own site.

There are various different options available: sites like Blogger LinkUp offer a free service – a bit like a dating service although they wouldn’t call it that – to help match up people who’d like to guest post and people who are in need of posts.

An offer I investigated recently is called Traffic Siphon and it teaches how to find sites to guest post on and how to approach them, as well as where to get articles written.

They suggest using iWriter and when I followed the instructions they gave, I got some excellent articles back.

I’ve since modified the suggested posting request to bring it more to my own style and also to get rid of the cookie cutter approach that always comes if you just copy someone else’s instructions (one of the iWriter writers actually asked me about this as they’d seen quite a few people use near enough the exact same wording).

Traffic Siphon’s methods are good but can still be time consuming as you’re waiting for blog owners to reply. Which I’m still doing for the two I’ve sent possible articles to – not a major number and I’m sure if I approached more blogs, I’d get a response.

But I’m impatient and wondered if there might be an easier way.

So I turned to Fiverr and did a search for guest posts.

Which returned just under 10,000 results.

OK, maybe I was onto something!

Fiverr still takes time and the better gigs reserve the right to refuse your post if it’s not up to scratch.

The gigs I chose were mainly related to internet marketing although two were related to the law of attraction.

I got the articles written on iWriter.

Normally I’d use their Basic level as I’ve used this regularly for articles written under a pen name and got good results.

Traffic Siphon suggests using Elite writers and if you don’t want to do any editing that’s definitely the way to go – the 5 articles I got back when I did this were top quality.

This time, I used Premium writers to see whether the middle ground option was best.

I’m happy editing the articles I get back to a small extent and, although the quality wasn’t quite as good as the Elite ones, it was still pretty good. So I’ll be keeping to Premium writers in future for this kind of work.

The articles I had written were for a minimum of 700 words, so they cost $7.15 each on iWriter.

That’s just slightly cheaper than GetArticlesDone – the other service I use – who have a base price of $7.95 for a 750+ word article, dropping to $7.35 for a bulk order.

iWriter is quick.

I got all the articles back within 24 hours.

The Fiverr gigs vary in their minimum word requirement – some need at least 250 words, others 300 words and a few at least 500 words.

So my articles easily exceeded those minimums – which was deliberate because I want these to actually be worthwhile content as well as backlinks.

It also means the style of the articles is easy – 10 tips or tricks style, which is useful for readers and tends to get good quality from writers as they don’t have to think quite as much!

The gigs didn’t usually specify the article format before purchase but most were happy with a Word document with the link embedded. One wanted the article as a text file. And one wanted the article in HTML format but since I’ve been coding HTML since I started on the web that wasn’t a problem.

Turnaround time between buying the gig and it showing on their site was anything from 1 to 3 days.

I bought 10 separate gigs – I’m not going to list them here as there are so many and a few of them were supposedly limiting the quantity of articles accepted. One I selected even returned my money as they had stopped their offer but it hadn’t got cancelled at Fiverr before I bought it.

And – for confidentiality reasons – I’m not going to post the URLs of the final posts either, sorry.

But I will give you an overview:

The PageRank of the main sites varied from PR1 to PR6.

Most of the gigs also quote a “DA” or “Domain Authority” figure. This is a third party figure and is probably a more accurate estimate than PageRank which doesn’t get updated very often. It’s a 0 to 100 scale where the higher the number the more authority the domain supposedly has.

Where it was quoted, DA was between 30 and 41 and this checked out with the checker I used so the gig descriptions seem OK in that respect.

Of the 10 gigs:

• 6 were showing in Google’s index within a day or two of the guest post being posted. That’s an excellent sign as it means that Google is crawling round the sites fast.
• 3 aren’t yet showing in Google’s index but there are plenty of pages from elsewhere in the site showing, so they will turn up in a few more days.
• 1 is no longer showing. Which is upsetting as it was removed within a day of being posted – the gig promised a page on a PR5 site and delivered on that promise. What it didn’t say was that the PR5 site allowed personal blogs on it, which is what the gig was offering and their account has been terminated.

Sites like aHrefs and Majestic will doubtless pick up the links and report on them in due course.

I spent $71.50 on articles and $50 on Fiverr gigs.

That means I got 9 sites pointing back with decent quality guest posts for $121.50, a cost of $13.50 per site linking back.

For a bunch of backlinks that are as white hat as any paid-for backlink is likely to be, I think that’s good.

They’re white hat – or at worst a very light shade of grey – because the articles are original, the posts are on real sites, checked by real people before going live.

And – apart from the one that got removed – they’ve been placed with permission of the site owner, rather than being spammed to a gazillion article directories or Wikis or whatever.

What this all means is that I’m going to (finally) add some form of fairly regular guest posting into the mix of promotion I do for my sites.

Fiverr has lots of places offering that, so do other sites like Blogger LinkUp (which I’m going to try again soon) as well as approaching sites directly as suggested in Traffic Siphon.

And, of course, a mix of all three methods would be even better as it would add diversity to the links.

You can find out a lot more about my experiment here.

Feel free to add your comments on guest blogging below.